An interview with Dixie Dillon Lane, author of “Skipping School”
Dixie Dillon Lane is an American historian and an Associate Editor at Hearth & Field. She writes for many publications, including Front Porch Republic. Her new book is Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How it Went Mainstream (Eerdmans, 2026). She was kind enough to share a bit about the book and her experiences in this interview.
I’m curious about your own experiences. Can you share a little bit about your own educational background? What was your schooling like growing up?
I attended public school K-12, including a one-year stint in a public school overseas. Generally speaking, public schools served me well, and I go into this at some length in the book – but my local public schools today are not places that I believe would serve my children well. It’s not that schools were once great and now they’re terrible – it’s that school experiences are very diverse across time and space. And some important things have changed for the negative across American public schooling since I went to school, too. And, in fact, the same schools I attended did not serve my younger brothers (twenty years younger than me) well at all. Things had seriously deteriorated by the time they went.
Was this a book you’ve just been wanting to write for a long time, or is there something about this book that makes it especially suited to this moment?
I’ve been working on this project for more than fifteen years in one way or another, so it’s definitely been a culmination of long-term interests and research for me. But it’s also something very much suited to this time in particular! Nationally, homeschooling has become considerably more interesting to the public since the Covid-19 pandemic. All sorts of things within American schooling got thrown up into the air during that period, and one result was that homeschooling numbers more than doubled in a single summer – for a while there, we had around a tenth of American kids being homeschooled! And even though the numbers aren’t as high anymore, they’re still really high – probably around 7% right now. That’s huge – and it means that homeschooling is no longer unusual. That’s a big change, and we need to understand it!
Why a history of homeschooling rather than simply a book about homeschooling that is more practice focused or even more of an advocacy book?
As a homeschooling parent, I do want to help other parents who want to homeschool – and actually, a couple of friends and I have a Substack that’s focused on practical homeschooling (The Bad Moms Homeschool).
But that is not my role as a researcher and historian (nor is advocacy), so that is not the point of this book. My goal with this book was to increase understanding – to examine and uncover historical sources that could help us understand what created the modern homeschooling movement and what it reflects about our society. Why would so many people do this? What has it been like for them? What are its causes and effects, and what does it tell us about our own time?
I also really wanted to help both parents and scholars both understand homeschooling. So, the book really does have two target readers: parents who are concerned about American education, and professional historians and other scholars. It’s a “crossover” book in many different ways, and that was deliberate.
Something that interests me about homeschooling is the way it often mixes two very different elements. So, on the one hand, many (not all) people turn to homeschooling because they want something more traditional. That could be the approach to learning or subject matter or moral education, etc. On the other hand, it seems as though many homeschooling families and groups have a sense of themselves as countercultural and therefore somewhat radical. Do you have any thoughts on this?
It’s such a both/and thing! People homeschool for all sorts of reasons, and in all sorts of ways, and in all sorts of contexts. Demographically, homeschoolers are quite similar to other Americans in the 2020s, which may come as a surprise to readers and even to homeschoolers themselves. This is because homeschooling is intensely local but is practiced across the nation, so even our own impressions of homeschooling may be over-influenced by what we see locally, and we might miss the overall picture.
So, one person may homeschool in a tight-knit conservative church community in a rural setting, but someone else may homeschool in an unschooling manner in an urban setting with highly progressive values. In other words, some people today do homeschool counterculturally, but the act of homeschooling is no longer itself fundamentally countercultural. Nor is it demographically limited. It’s absolutely fascinating!
I’ve had quite a bit of interaction with the homeschool world and I know that homeschoolers are often unfairly stereotyped. But I know that homeschoolers also sometimes stereotype public schools and those students. I think on both sides people are often not aware of the wide variety of what is on offer under those broad labels. How do you think both sides could do better to understand and appreciate each other? What would be gained from that?
This speaks again to the importance of keeping in mind both personal/local experiences and broader patterns. We also need to keep in mind perspectives from both inside and outside of each education choice (homeschooling, public schooling, and private schooling). This helps keep our imaginations open so that we do not rely on stereotypes or reflexively condemn choices other than our own. It’s a major and deliberate part of the design of my book, and a way in which the book differs from much that is written about homeschooling.
Just looking at macro-level data or patterns isn’t enough, in other words. But neither is looking only at anecdotes or personal experience. If I were to look just at the data on public school performance nationally, in my state, or in my school district, I would probably conclude that public schooling is a terrible option for children, full stop. And indeed, my husband and I have chosen not to send our children to our local public schools because of our academic and social concerns, and we are quite confident in this decision.
But that’s not the whole story of public schooling, either, and as I jogged past our neighborhood public high school one evening, I saw another part of the story. The school’s girls’ soccer team was deep into a scrimmage, and I saw the joy and determination on the player’s faces, heard the coach shouting encouraging instructions, and witnessed teammates laughing together as they walked to their cars after finishing practice. I thought to myself, How absolutely fantastic. Those girls are so lucky to have that team and those coaches and this opportunity – all of it provided by a public school.
And that can go the other way, too – you may have a negative personal experience with a form of schooling that fades in power when you look at national patterns or hear the positive experience of others. So even when we make strong arguments or have to fight for our own choices, we can acknowledge that stereotypes are rarely helpful, and we can be open to correcting and rebalancing conclusions as necessary.
People who are interested in homeschooling are probably going to be interested in your book pretty quickly. What would people who are not especially interested in homeschooling gain from reading your book?
The history of homeschooling is about so much more than homeschooling itself! Homeschooling arose in reaction to public schooling, and it’s also strongly linked to American beliefs about education that are centuries-old, especially the belief in local control and parental influence in schooling. I believe the book will challenge readers to think of the direction of American schooling differently as they see how homeschooling reflects and responds to it. Homeschooling has a lot to teach us about how we can improve schooling overall in American, for all children – because the truth is that for most families, public schools are the only possible choice. But those public schools are by and large not serving children as well as we would like.
This is a very broad question, but compared to some other countries, education in America is much more varied. We have public, private, charter, magnet, religious, homeschool, etc. and even within states, things can vary from one place to another even in the same category. And not even all 50 states require U.S. history. How do you think that educational diversity has shaped our country and our culture?
Yes, it’s very, very diverse! There are a few reasons for that. One is that the country is simply so large – it’s much easier for a place like Sweden or even a bigger European country like France to have a more centralized school system. Another reason is that Americans prioritized literacy among its citizens from the beginning, because American Protestants (from the Puritans onward) believed so strongly that individual Christians should be able to read the Bible personally. School culture also varies according to locale, even today.
Thus, for most of American history schooling was highly locally controlled, and is part of the story of the continuous tension across the centuries between state and federal matters, among other things. Americans don’t always like to be told what to do by “outside” voices – just in case you haven’t noticed! Localism in education has shaped and been shaped by this reality, both for good and for ill.
What is your favorite book about education?
That’s a hard question! I don’t think I have a favorite, but I really like to read memoirs and fiction and mine them for information about education. And I also love to read about education within subcultures. One summer, when I was about 15, I walked to our downtown public library a few times a week and read through the entire education section, which was how I first learned about education among the Amish and among other religious groups. The Amish are particularly interesting, and I recommend the work of John and Elizabeth Hostetler in this area.
If people want to hear more from you about homeschooling, how can they do that?
Other than by reading the book, people can follow my work through my Substacks, The Hollow and The Bad Moms Homeschool, or check out the journal where I’m an editor, Hearth & Field. I also definitely recommend Front Porch Republic for content about education (among other things)!
Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice
